The Phoenix Mercury's Cappie Pondexter, left, and Diana Taurasi pose in the team's new jerseys at the NBA Store in New York on June 1.

By Christine Brennan, USA TODAY

Purists must be shuddering at the news that the WNBA's Phoenix Mercury have sold their jersey front, if not their soul, to a sponsor. Never mind that most of these sports fans have never seen the Mercury play and couldn't begin to tell you what the jersey looked like before Arizona-based identity-theft protection company LifeLock bought the front.

They just know that it's a slap at the team's local identity, an affront to tradition, a sellout and/or the beginning of a very slippery slope.

They're forgetting one other thing that it most definitely is: the future.

"Anybody who has followed the commercialization of sport could have predicted this would happen, especially in this economy," said Richard Lapchick, chairman of the DeVos Sport Business Management Program at the University of Central Florida.

"You're going to see more and more of this," said former AOL executive Jimmy Lynn of JLynn Associates, a sports strategic advisory firm. "I definitely see it happening in men's major sports within five years."

"It's natural product placement," said WNBA President Donna Orender. "We're a ground-breaking league. We're not bound by convention. I think this enhances who we are."

Normally, this kind of talk turns my stomach. Give me X's and O's over brand management any day of the week. But, in this instance, why should we get worked up about what's on a pro athlete's team jersey when we're already so used to seeing the commercial clutter on the clothing of individual sport athletes from golf, tennis and, of course, auto racing?

This splash of interest in plastering sponsors' names on anything that moves isn't just a WNBA phenomenon, although the league is close to announcing a second jersey sponsor for another of its teams. Two Women's Professional Soccer league teams — in Los Angeles and New Jersey — have sponsor names on their jerseys, and the NFL's Houston Texans and Green Bay Packers have expressed interest in taking advantage of a new league rule allowing teams to sell small sponsorship patches on practice jerseys.

"It's the right way to go," Lynn said. "Think about how people watch games now. They TiVo them and zap through the commercials, or they watch on television but don't pay attention to the commercials. That's why in-game advertising is so important, and why the uniform has become such a valuable place."

This isn't new, it's just a new twist on an old theme: the selling of sports in America and elsewhere.

It was nearly 17 years ago that Michael Jordan, a Nike guy, draped a U.S. flag over his warmup suit at the 1992 Olympics to hide the team's Reebok logo. Pro soccer teams here and abroad traditionally wear jerseys bearing their sponsor's name on the front. So do overseas pro basketball teams, men's and women's.

And you can't watch a game in any college sport without noticing the shoe companies that have attached themselves to the jerseys of nearly every athlete, making a swoosh or three stripes as omnipresent as the school colors.

It would be wonderful if every sporting event could remain as pristine as Wimbledon or The Masters, but that takes the kind of institutional war chest that most sports don't possess, women's sports in particular. As a culture, we've decided we want girls and women to play sports, but so far, most of us aren't supporting them when they graduate to the pros.

Enter companies such as LifeLock. "When a league that has a classy reputation like the WNBA does this," Lapchick said, "it kind of legitimizes it, and it also makes sense for a women's sport to do this."

Remember when we all thought the world was coming to an end when sponsors renamed bowl games and stadiums? Now, we barely give that a second thought. No one is expecting to sell the naming rights to the end zone at the Super Bowl, and Major League Baseball was right to not allow Spider-Man 2 logos on the bases five years ago.

But jerseys? Why not? Look at the bright side: Whatever they put on those uniforms in the WNBA will never be as distracting as the tattoos running up and down the arms of players in the NBA.

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